


stay and be there (always)

by aimmyarrowshigh, Draco_sollicitus



Series: #damereydaily2020 [13]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (From across the galaxy), BB-8 Parent Trap, Babu Frik: Matchmaker, Co-Droid-Parents, Damerey Daily, Droid rescue and rehabilitation, F/M, Falling In Love, Post-TRoS, Romance, Shared Custody of a Droid, Yearning, switching POV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:34:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22251187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draco_sollicitus/pseuds/Draco_sollicitus
Summary: Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?The war is over. The heroes of the Resistance step out into the galaxy to find their place in peacetime.Rey Skywalker settles on Tatooine, rescuing and rehabilitating droids. As she attempts to coax life into a barren desert, she finds herself in increasing communication with General Poe Dameron, with whom she shares custody of a certain round, mischievous droid.Rey fully expected to be forgotten in the days after the fall of the Final Order; but it's Poe who remembers her more and more with each passing day.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Rey
Series: #damereydaily2020 [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588336
Comments: 27
Kudos: 170
Collections: Damerey Daily 2020





	stay and be there (always)

**Author's Note:**

> (Written for Day 13 of Damerey Daily)

**001\. Rey**

Tatooine is hotter than Jakku, but less dry. Rey fixes the vaporators that have long stood empty on the Skywalker land, and the way they fill with clean, drinkable water pulled from the air itself--it’s more magical than the Force. She listens to BB-8 recount stories that get increasingly outlandish about the bravery and heroism of Poe and Black Squadron, and all of their even-more-heroic droids of course, as she gets the moisture farm back to rights.

Soon, she has enough water and enough sunlight to ride the old speederbike into Mos Eisley and barter for some seeds. She plants a hydrogarden with tiny promises that there will be vegetables in a few cycles, and bright red berries.

“See?” She motions for BB-8 to turn its photoreceptor towards the hanging trough of water and nutripellets. “Finn, if we can get this kind of tech to Jakku--”

“I’ll bring it up in session,” Finn promises. He sounds tired. Work in the Core, or what remains of it, starting a new Senate with Rose and Kaydel Ko Connix and a few of the former stormtroopers who remembered Finn fondly, seems like even more exhausting work than repairing a moisture farm. “You think it will help keep the Rim from falling back on Imperial ideas?”

“Ideas, I don’t know,” Rey admits. BB-8 turns away from the hydrogarden and starts to investigate yet another corner of the Skywalker homestead that Rey only recently unearthed from the shifting dunes. “But if people are able to sustain themselves, they won’t be as easy to--to manipulate. Or to conquer.”

Maybe if she hadn’t been so hungry on Jakku--hungry for love and belonging, as well as food and water--she wouldn’t have let Ben Solo and Palpatine dictate the last year of her life. It’s worth a try to see if keeping others full will save them from the same fate.

“I agree.” Finn yawns. “Maybe Poe can work something out with the Yavinese colony to donate seeds. Maker knows he’s up to his eyeballs in koyo melons out there. Have you talked to him lately?”

“No.” Rey looks down at where BB-8’s round bottom is peeking out of a nook. “But he’ll probably want Beebee-Ate back soon. I know Beebee’s been missing him.”

* * *

**001\. Poe**

Poe is not surprised when the message pings, sent by BB-8 to the R-4 unit his dad kept over from the last war.

He is, however, surprised at the request it contains.

“Come to Tatooine,” Rey of Jakku says. It’s not phrased as a demand, per se, but Poe’s gotten enough marching papers in the past to know an order when he hears one. “BB-8 misses you. Bring seeds.”

End of transmission.

Poe laughs under his breath at the wild girl from the desert and trails through the open fields on Yavin 4. Thresher droids work to his left and right as he walks down furrows and skips over irrigation trenches; he gathers a few extra gourds and melons, flowers and grains, ones he thinks Rey will approve of, and then heads off to the A-Wing still parked in the corner of the compound.

The flight to Tatooine is uneventful, and Poe’s mind drifts as Hyperspace blurs around him. He’s heard plenty from Finn, Rose, and Kaydel, received updates from Jess and Karé; hells, he’s even been pinged by Lando once or twice. But to be summoned to the childhood home of the Skywalkers - Poe’s thrown off. Just a little.

Something about Rey has always thrown him, though.

He parks the bird easily enough - nothing on Tatooine for miles and miles and miles - and he feels a lonely pang behind his heart when he spies her, standing on the ridge by herself, one lone figure on an empty horizon.

“Hey,” he greets her as he walks up, a scarf pulled over his head to block out the worst of the sun. Rey nods at him, and as he nears her post, he sees that she’s standing in front of what looks like a garden.

BB-8 trills excitedly as it rolls up to him, and Poe kneels down, knees in the burning sand, to hug the droid. Its metal body is spiky-hot with sunlight, but Poe doesn’t care.

“Rey takin’ good care of you, buddy?” He asks. BB-8 beeps in indignation - of _course_ Rey takes wonderful care of it!

“Did you bring the seeds?” Rey asks tilting her head down at them. He swears he sees her smile; he swears it’s more than a trick of the light. Poe pulls out the packet from his front pocket and forks it over. He’s not imagining her smile this time, not when he explains the contents of the packet.

“Did I do good, Jedi?” He drawls, standing up and brushing sand from his pants.

“Yes,” Rey whispers, smiling at him over her shoulder before she goes to kneel among the delicate bumps in the reconfigured ground. Poe sees a small, wobbly droid rise up and lift a cannister of water almost hopefully. “Not now,” Rey chides, patting its skinny belly. The droid warbles, a one note song of sadness. “Not yet.”

Poe watches Rey of Jakku, formerly Palpatine, now Skywalker, coax living things from the ground and finds himself believing in miracles for the first time in years.

In a day, he’ll wake up before the twin suns and leave Tatooine, back to Yavin where the farm needs him. He takes BB-8 with him and doesn’t let himself look out the starviewer to see if Rey’s watching him leave - right up until he hits 1000 feet.

Then, Poe turns around and looks, and sure enough, he can see her, a lone drop of color against endless sand.

“Hey!” he comms down. “When do you want Beebee to come back?”

* * *

**002\. Rey**

In Beebee-Ate’s absence, the Skywalker farm seems more like the desolate, lonely home that Luke told Rey about. Rey fixes up all of the old droids and makes nice with the Jawas, who are keen to sell her parts in exchange for favors that are easy enough to accomplish with the Force. She finds them kaup eggs buried deep in the sand for years, long enough to grow large and ripen, and she trades them for oil, bolts, new chasses… whatever her little charges need. In return, both the droids and the Jawas become fiercely loyal to Rey.

But still, she finds that she misses… talking to people. It’s strange. And annoying. She spent the first twenty years of her life scarcely saying a word to anyone, and then after only a year and a half around the Resistance, it’s _lonely_ not to share her thoughts with anyone who can speak back.

The droids can, a bit, in their chattering binary and little stuttering voices. But she misses BB-8.

She misses Finn. And Poe.

But the desert sky reminds her that there are bigger things in the Galaxy than one woman’s loneliness, and she refuses to give in and beg for Poe to send BB-8 back to Tatooine. It belongs to Poe, not Rey, and she doesn’t keep things that aren’t hers. It’s why she came here in the first place and buried the Skywalker ‘sabers. They weren’t hers to wield.

Besides, Poe is busy on Yavin IV. Just as Finn is busy on Chandrila. And Rey is busy here, she reminds herself late at night, when she’s eating kaup eggs and rehydrated bread. She has lots of work to do while the suns are up.

And being lonely at night--even back at the Resistance base, that creeping sensation set in. Whenever Poe squeezed her arm and bid her goodnight at the door to her quarters, or when he and Finn would fly off in the Falcon and leave Rey to her Jedi training with Leia. It’s nothing new.

And it isn’t terrible.

But still, when Rey’s first Tatooine sandstorm blows in--not X’us’R’ii’a, they don’t believe in the same gods here--she fiddles with a broken datapad until it can connect to the holonet.

Her fingers hesitate only a second before she taps out the message: _Ready for a visit?_

While she waits for the ping-back telling her she’s welcome, she goes searching for a solution to the little MSE-unit who’s stuck on one task only. Rey posts to a board set up for scavenger-types, her people, and she gets a response from _that_ much faster than from a little jungle moon. When she sees the username, Rey grins.

* * *

**002\. Poe**

Yavin doesn’t have a cold season. It’s fairly humid, always some level of warm, and lush with life year-round. The harvest takes up some time, and Poe appreciates fully how much work his pa must have put into the place years ago when he was a teenager and younger. Poe hadn’t noticed then, of course, beyond the things kids notice. Now, with Kes off-moon helping Lando with some unfinished business, Poe’s almost solely responsible for the farm during the harvest, and he is legitimately exhausted.

Thank the gods for the droids: he gets used to hearing their chirrups and beeps, their whizz-clanks and grumbles, and as Poe walks the farm, monitoring the collection of koyo, gourds, and the like, BeeBee-Ate rolls along merrily at his side.

The sky blossoms blue and bright overhead, the fading kind of heat in the late afternoons wrapping around Poe like a blanket. He leaves his holopad at home most afternoons, not wanting to be distracted from his work - that’s how a boy loses a finger or two or ten, he can almost hear his dad say - but he checks it near religiously each night when he walks in, his white shirt translucent with sweat, stained with streaks of brown-red-orange dirt.

Finn’s doing well, and of course he is; he and Rosie and Kaydel. Poe chats with them, or sends messages, and pictures, and wishes, and once he lets himself ask Finn if he’s heard from Rey.

“Not really.” Finn frowns, and his face flickers in the holoscreen. “She’s … she’s been going through a lot recently.”

“Right.” Poe nods, ignores the curl of jealousy in his gut at the inherent understanding between Rey and Finn, two Force-Sensitive people who have access to a galaxy that feels separate to the one Poe’s living in. He doesn’t say what’s on his mind, though:

Rey’s been going through a lot a whole lot more than just _recently._

So, when he gets home from the day’s work, a few weeks into the season and sees a flickering light on his holopad, he grabs it with a grin that becomes a shout of surprise that goes unheard by anyone but BeeBee.

He has two messages: one, a reply to a query he’d sent out on the ‘Net about parts for a thresher droid that had nearly self-destructed. The other: a four-word message from Rey, asking--

 _Always ready for you,_ Poe types back quickly, grinning, and it feels bright and good and a little, tiny bit selfish because Rey’s leaving Tatooine, and she’s leaving it to come visit _him,_ and she asked _him_ first.

* * *

**003\. Rey**

Yavin IV isn’t much hotter than Tatooine, but it isn’t any cooler, either, and the humidity makes Rey’s clothing stick to her skin. The scent of _green_ and _life_ almost knocks her backwards when her boots land on the soft, muddy surface of the moon. She can smell ten thousand plants growing, hear the pattering feet of more animals in one acre of jungle than the whole of Tatooine.

Poe’s orchard is set away from the main settlement and the old Rebel base. Rey is glad for that; even as she flew over the imposing stone pyramid, she could feel the cold, trickling energy of the ancient Sith who imbued the temple with their anger and fear. It’s weak--nothing like Exegol--but Rey is still relieved when she disembarks her ship at the Dameron ranch and finds that the Force is quiet here. Alive, but peaceful.

«BRRR-ZEET?» A little droid with a wheel like D-0’s rolls up to Rey.

“Hello, there!” Rey smiles at it and squats down to adjust its antenna. “Yes, I am Rey. How did you know?”

The little droid circles around itself in excitement as it beeps and whirrs about how «The Legend Beebee-Ate said Jedi-Rey can bring droids back from the dead! Jedi-Rey saves droids from bad creatures! Jedi-Rey is as fast as an astromech!»

“I don’t know if all of that’s true,” Rey says gently. She adjusts the little thing’s antenna again. “I bet you’re very fast. I don’t know if I could keep up.”

The droid trills with glee. «I will show you where Beebee-Ate and Friend-Poe are and I will not go too fast for you, Jedi-Rey!»

Rey slows her steps enough to match pace with the little sentry droid as it weaves along the rows of koyo shoots and winefruit vines. This place… it’s beautiful. Rey wants to touch all of the growing plants and whisper to them how wonderful they are, how grateful she is that they’re alive in this Galaxy where too many things have died.

Instead, she says hello to all of the harvester droids whose green enamel heads lift when she passes. Their Binary chatter sounds like the murmurs of gossip that sometimes susurrated around the mess hall back at the Resistance base, and she can tell that one by one, row by row, the droids are telling one another that _Jedi-Rey is here._

Near the outskirts of the koyo patch, across a broad field of rippling green and gold, the wheeled sentry droid stops and trills again.

«Wait here, Jedi-Rey! I will inform Beebee-Ate and Friend-Poe of your presence.» It disappears into the tall stalks of grain waving in the Yavin breeze.

A rusty, clanking sound behind her makes Rey turn away from the mesmerizing sight of the field rustling like the waves in the water of Endor’s moon. She frowns at the way one of the harvester droid’s knee joints sticks, mud caught in the gears.

“H-he-hello,” the droid stammers, nervous like D-0 was when Rey first found him. “Are-are-are you--are you Jedi-Rey?”

“Just Rey,” Rey says, and she smiles at the green droid. “What’s your name?”

“See-See-See-See--” The droid seems frustrated, and it stops for a moment to reset itself with a mechanical grinding sound. “Seedee-Sixty. Seedee-Sixty.” Its dome tilts down to look at the ground.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Seedee-Sixty.” Rey touches its central controller box--its torso--with a light hand. “Would it be alright with you if I clean that mud out of your knee?”

A few bips and boops of surprised binary fall out of the harvester droid’s mouth. “Y-y-yes, please.”

Rey kneels down this time, uncaring if her own knees get muddy in the rich soil, and she pulls a small awl out of her pack to scrape the dried mud away from the droid’s gears. Beneath the green paint, CD-60 is constructed in First Order black. The mark of the Con Star Mining Corporation, which she knows Rose and Finn are working hard to dismantle, is still embossed on its flank beneath the fresh coat of sanding and enamel.

No wonder the poor thing is nervous. Rey blows the last of the dried mud away from Seedee’s knee joint, then stands again.

“There you are,” she says. “Now you’re perfect.”

“Th-th-th-thank-thank-thank--” Seedee stops to reset its circuits again. “Thank you, Jedi-Rey.” It spins on its rotor and clips a single bright golden bloom of some flower Rey has never seen before off of a curling vine. “For-for-for you.”

Rey’s cheeks go pink in the Yavinese sun. “Thank you. It’s very beautiful.”

She tucks the flower behind her ear without another thought and cups Seedee’s controller box one last time; there’s a rustle in the grass as the sentry-droid zips towards her.

«The Legend BeeBee-Ate and Friend-Poe approach!»

* * *

**003\. Poe**

Rey’s wearing a flower behind her ear like a burst of starlight. Fitting, given that Poe often thought, privately, deep down where he wouldn’t let slip to anyone, that Rey was a bit like sunshine herself.

Sometimes too potent, always bright, always dazzling… necessary.

Poe clears his throat and lifts a hand in greeting, bumped viciously in the calf by his droid a second later as it whirls through the grass screaming for Rey.

One of the recalibrated ConStar droids lingers at her elbow, gazing up at her and away from its prime directive of harvesting. There’s a little trio of droids in front of her by the time Poe gets there, and she smiles dazzlingly at them, and by the time she glances up to him, her smile hasn’t dimmed in the slightest.

Poe, who hasn’t seen a person in weeks, almost stumbles in the slick soil. He manages to keep his balance though, and tucks his hands into his pockets so Rey can’t see how caked in the mud is around his fingernails, how he’s red to the wrist from tugging at weeds and sticking his hands into overheated droid bellies.

“Heya, Jedi.”

“Lo, Poe.” Her eyes crinkle with delight as SNT-5 clamors for attention around her ankles. “Oh, Dio would love you.”

«Dio?» The droid stops and tilts on its axis, considering this. «Friend?»

“A wonderful friend,” Rey confirms, bending to wiggle BB-8’s atennae.

“You hungry?” Poe asks, feeling like he needs to offer her something - she’s traveled all this way, he decides, so he has to achieve some level of hospitality for the galaxy traveler. They traipse through the fields, Poe answering Rey’s questions about the droids, but whenever she’s silent (she’s more quiet than chatter, but that’s nothing new), he peeks over his shoulder to make sure she hasn’t fallen into an irrigation ditch, and always, always her eyes are on the trees, the vines, the green.

Poe grins to himself and opens the door for Rey, letting her into the main buiding’s kitchen where he’s had chilis simmering on heat for hours on end, watches in delight as she tilts back her little face and inhales with a gusto he’s missed.

“Food,” Rey sighs dreamily, drifting to the stove, her hands folded up in front of her chest like an acolyte at prayer.

“Hope you came hungry,” Poe teases, going to wash his hands. He doesn’t have to hear her answer of _always_ to know it exists, and he chuckles as he runs the scratchy brillah pad under his nails a little more intensely than normal.

Dinner passes by with a happiness that feels deeper than the peace Poe’s come to find on Yavin 4, and Rey sits, chin propped in her hand, as he probably bores her half to death with stories about the farm and the harvest. The droids clatter around the kitchen, brought in by the presence of the hero BeeBee’s always going on about, and Rey greets each of them with growing delight, her joy stamped on her face for everyone to see.

She eyes the more timid ones with sadness, and when she looks to Poe in those moments, he feels her compassion filling up the space between them; Poe has an idea why a girl like Rey would feel so much for little droids, kept at the mercy of cruel people. It makes him sad, and he tries to hide it from her.

Rey flips an ELM unit on its back and runs an admiring hand along the circuitry there. “Don’t see parts like this that often,” she comments idly.

Poe thinks to his contact for droidsmithing and grins. “Nah, I guess you don’t. Should I pass along your compliments?”

“Do,” Rey says, standing and grinning. She yawns, sharp and pretty, like a Loth-Cat who’s forgotten it has daggers on the ends of its hands, and Poe shows her the guest room before heading to the ‘fresher at the front of the house. It’s an early morning for him tomorrow, and he’ll need to get some kinda rest, no matter who’s visiting.

When he passes by her still-open door, Rey’s curled up on the bed, nestled against the pillows, watching BeeBee-Ate as it projects a vid of some sort on the sheets. Rey giggles, sleep-soft and gentle, and Poe pauses in the doorway, something warm in his gut at the sight. Then, he sees what BB-8 is projecting.

“What is that from?” He splutters, barging into the room. Rey doesn’t even look up, unsurprised by his presence.

«Two days ago!» BeeBee announces, as the vid of Poe struggling to lift the head of a massive TRX unit continues to play.

“Buddy!” Poe fusses. “Rey probably wants to sleep, not watch weird homevids.”

“I don’t mind.” Rey yawns again, though, and BeeBee coos worriedly, powering down the projection. She pats its optical unit soothingly. “Maybe tomorrow, BeeBee?”

The droid rattles through the door to stand with Poe in the hallway, and Poe watches Rey wrap an arm around her middle. He can’t quite make out her expression in the dark, but her shoulders look tighter than they did a second ago.

“BeeBee doesn’t like that I snore,” Poe announces, and BeeBee looks at him in confusion as it has never once complained about Poe’s very loud snoring. “So why doesn’t he stay in here with you?”

“Hm?” Rey sits up slightly, the sheet held to her chest; Poe sees that she’s swapped into a sleeveless shirt to sleep in, and his throat goes dry.

“Uh. You snore?”

“I- I suppose not,” Rey offers awkwardly, and Poe nods, tapping the doorframe.

“Right. Go on, BeeBee, stay with Rey.” He nudges the droid forward with his foot, and watches the droid roll to Rey’s bedside.

She stretches her hand out to rest on its round body, and Poe smiles to himself before closing the door.

* * *

**004\. Rey**

Yavin IV is louder at night than Tatooine, but nowhere near as loud as the Resistance base. All the same, Rey’s eyes fly open at every unfamiliar creak of a strange house and crack of a branch outside breaking beneath the hooves of heavy jungle nocturnals. A lifetime of light sleeping--needing to be aware in case someone decided to take her belongings, or worse, while she was vulnerable--leaves Rey awake and staring up through the window at the red and violet light swirling through the stars from Yavin’s gas giant above.

«Hero-Rey?» BB-8’s gyros whirr as it rolls closer. «Are you in distress?»

“No, Beebee, I’m alright.” Rey turns away from the stars to look down at the round droid. “Where does Poe get all of these Imperial droids?”

«They are not Imperial!» Beebee blurts indignantly and sounds more like R2-D2 than ever. «They are friends. Friend-Poe rescues them from bad Imperials. Like you rescued me from a bad Teedo!»

“Well, and you’ve rescued me before, too,” Rey reminds BB-8. “You don’t need to call me Hero-Rey, you know. We’re friends.”

«A friend can be a hero.» BB-8 rotates thoughtfully on its gyroscope. «Does it distress you to be called Hero-Rey? I can rewrite my programming!»

“I -- ” _Does_ it distress her to be called a hero? It still doesn’t feel like Rey did very much. She knows that she did, rationally, if she tries to center herself the way Leia taught her and puts all of the events of the last year into a clear order. She killed Palpatine. Ended the Sith.

But that wasn’t enough to wipe them from the Galaxy. Even the harvester droids on Poe Dameron’s peaceful farm still bear scars and memories of the cruelty of the First Order, and the Empire, and the Sith. Rey didn’t fix that.

“No, Beebee,” Rey says softly. “You can call me whatever you like.”

BB-8 rolls up to Rey’s bedside and nudges her hand until she gives its dome a stroke. Then she lies down again and wills her mind quiet, into the serene place she goes to meditate, and tries to fall asleep.

In the morning, Rey adjusts the antennae or circuit coils of a duckling line of droids as she eats the breakfast Poe left out on the table for her.

 _“Out in the field,”_ he says in an apologetic holo. “ _Sorry to leave you without saying good-bye. Bugs wait for no man when there’s koyo to eat, and I gotta get them out of the ground before they’re gone. Help yourself to whatever you want from the kitchen. Plenty to take back to Tatooine if you want. Uh…”_ He scratched his chin, the thick beard that had grown in since the final battle. _“See you, Rey. Take care of my droid. And, uh, yourself.”_

Rey doesn’t take his food. Poe needs it; he’s doing hard labor out in the sun, and besides--it’s his. Rey has plenty back on Tatooine, between the ration packs and the endless supply of kaup eggs.

Little sentry droid DD-11 rolls alongside Rey and BB-8 as they make their way across the orchard and back to Rey’s ship. It boops and beeps sadly all the way, its shiny photoreceptor swiveling to look at Rey with something like heartbreak.

“Don’t worry, little friend,” Rey says, finally, when the gangplank of the Falcon lowers. “I’ll see you again soon.”

«Promise?»

“I do.” Rey smiles at the hoot of joy, and she watches from the Falcon’s entryway until the little droid is out of sight--just in case.

Once they hit atmo and the ship is set to autopilot for the passage between Yavin IV and Tatooine, ey stands, stretches, and heads back to the holonet interface.

There’s a message waiting for her with a complex programming override for her stuck MSE.

Rey opens the reply window with a soft smile. “Hello, Babu Frik,” she says aloud as she types her response. “Knew I could count on you…”

* * *

**004\. Poe**

The night after she leaves, Poe tells himself he doesn’t look up to the chair Rey had occupied only twenty-four Standard hours ago, expecting to see her smile. It’d be ridiculous, after all. She was here for such a small amount of time, glancing off the pattern of his life like a rock skipped against the still surface of a lake.

Leaving ripples that lasted after it disappeared from sight.

Normally, BeeBee would roll up to him and beep anxiously at his melancholy, but the droid’s gone, fifteen thousand parsecs away. Loneliness is something Poe knows pretty well, whether or not anyone would believe him. He’d grown up quiet, first in the shadow of his abuelo, dodging Imps where they could; then, lingering at the edges of the farm, skipping to visit his best friend, who happened to be a tree; then, the years at the Academy where he threw himself into being the best, always the best.

The squadron had filled in the gaps in his heart, but they’re scattered now, or worse. Finn’s his buddy, forever and true, but he’s saving the galaxy. And Rey -

Well, he’d just had Rey here. She’d been here, brief and dazzling like a supernova, and if it weren’t for the droids who all suddenly, suspiciously looked in a lot better shape, he would probably be able to convince himself she’d been a dream.

“Friend-Poe?” An SWF rolls up to him, clattering enough to break his reverie.

“Hey, buddy.” Poe smiles at the little cleaning unit, who meeps timidly and holds out a claw. It’s busted at the hinge. “What’dya do there?”

“Bumped i-i-i-it,” SWF-2 admits, and Poe winces, remembering where this one had been saved from: a First Order officer’s den of iniquity.

“Lemme get that for you.” Poe stands, happy to have the quiet interrupted, and grabs his toolbox from the space on the shelf near the stove. He pats around for a wrench that he knows rolled out last time he used the tools, and his hand bumps into something dry. Soft. Fragile.

Poe holds the toolbox in place on his hip and pulls down the mysterious object:

He’s holding a flower, dried and pressed, that had once shone as brightly as starlight. Poe’s fingers close around the bloom, and he holds it to his heart for a second.

“Friend-Poe, are you in distress?” SWF-2 asks, and Poe shakes his head.

“Give me a second, would you?” Poe walks to his bedroom and places the bloom delicately between the pages of his journal; he sets his hand on the cover after closing it before remembering SWF’s waiting for him, and he heads back to the kitchen, subconsciously leaving enough room at his ankles when he turns the corner for a round droid who isn’t even there anymore.

Poe goes on with his established routine as the harvest season comes to an end: wake up, work in the fields, fix droids, eat, fix droids, sleep -

It’s good work, and he’s happy with it, but the best part of his day is when his holopad pings or the R-4 unit rattles over with messages from across the galaxy. The months pass and fade away, and one day, a TI-unit with a scrambled motherboard shows up on his doorstep via Finn, and Poe finds himself messaging someone who never fails to make him smile.

He even gets him on the comms, and Poe’s already laughing by the time the tiny, grey, fuzzy image comes into focus:

“Hey, hey, heeeey-ooo!”

“Babu Frik, you old son of a gun, how you been?”

* * *

**005\. Rey**

Rey can hardly find enough hours in the day to do all of the jobs she’s committed herself to on the old Skywalker farm--and there are two suns on this planet to make each day long. But now she’s taking care of a fragile, tender garden only just learning to grow, and she’s seeking out eggs for the Jawas to trade for droid parts, and then those droid parts are going to good use as she repairs not only the old Skywalker homestead, but droids and machinery from all around Mos Eisley.

BB-8 rolls alongside her, offering tools from its compartments and soothing anxious farming droids who haven’t seen maintenance in a generation.

«Do not be distressed!» Beebee beeps at an old IR-1977 irrigation droid, the poor thing’s sensory circuits all welded shut by rust and sand. «Hero-Rey is a talented droidsmith. She is very gentle.»

“Thank you, Beebee,” Rey says, and she’s genuinely touched. It’s a new phase in her life, she knows, if she can be described as _gentle_ . “It’s alright to be nervous, Eye-Arr-One-Nine-Seven-Seven. It’s been a long time since anyone was kind to you, hasn’t it?”

The droid squeaks a long, howling note of pain. «I saw it happen.» It says, in halting binary. «My masters… were not unkind.»

“The Skywalkers?” Rey pauses in her careful scrubbing of the rust on the irrigation droid’s hydrodetector spigot. She hasn’t found anyone at Mos Eisley who remembers them--everyone has _heard_ of Luke Skywalker, but even Rey can tell the difference now between the myth and the man.

And when she can’t, there’s a very unimpressed ghost hanging around nearby, huffing and rolling his eyes at stories of a sole lightsaber cutting down all of the tentacles of the Sarlacc out by the old Hutt palace, or jumping the distance of Beggar’s Canyon blindfolded.

It would be nice to hear something _true,_ for once, about this family who changed the Galaxy.

«No, Mistress-Rey.» The IR-unit whirrs nervously. «Master-Owen and Mistress-Beru were my masters. Nephew-Luke was not my master.» It jerks and rolls back a half-measure from Rey’s hands. «I saw Nephew-Luke.»

“Me, too,” Rey says, trying to put a smile in her voice so that the blind droid can hear it. “He’s still alive, Eye-Arr-One-Nine--”

«The only one!» The droid’s binary is rough and _pained_ , full of emotion. «He left us behind! Followed a shiny new droid! When he came back… he did not even check on us!»

Rey knows what it is to be left behind in the midst of a tragedy. She found the graves on the edge of the farm’s duneland, one worn smooth and the other still just barely legible with _Cliegg_ . Master-Owen and Master-Beru must have been Luke’s uncle and aunt, since they programmed this droid to call him Nephew-Luke. And they must have been who had buried Cliegg and the other body beneath the shifting Tatooine sand, one whose Force signature still burns like she’s alive down there.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says, at the same time that BB-8 hums a comforting series of tones and spins anxiously on its axis. “That’s terrible, that Luke never came back for you.”

«I buried my masters.» The IR-unit’s internal mechanisms begin to short-circuit again, although Rey _finally_ got it repaired and cleaned all of the sand from its motherboard. It shivers on the dune even under the sweltering heat of the twin suns. «I am equipped. I am equipped to. I am equipped to perform. I am eq-eq-eq-eq-eq--”

With a puff of blue smoke and a spray of sparks, the droid goes still again.

BB-8 rolls up close to Rey. The metal of its round casing is blazing-hot against the side of her arm as they both hang their heads.

«Hero-Rey, I believe this droid-friend needs more assistance than a basic mechanical repair.» BB-8 sounds… older, somehow. Less like a child. War changes everyone. «Perhaps Designation: Babu Frik can advise you in selective memory removal for Designation: IR-1977’s future well-being?»

* * *

**005\. Poe**

The second he sets foot on that rock, Poe can feel a change. He doesn’t know how he knows, but there’s a _hum_ where before there was only a lifeless haze.

When he rounds the front of the Lars Homestead he can see why; saplings reach upwards to the two suns, green and real and good. Sprouts and bursts of life pepper the ground, bursting out of soil made fertile.

And at the top of a row, a few dozen yards away, Rey Skywalker sits in the sand, tongue between her teeth as she runs a vibroblade around a twist of weed, separating it from the fragile beginnings of a kashyyyk-gourd. The suns shine down on her, and she looks… not _happy_ . At peace.

Poe’s about to shout in greeting when an irrigation droid at the top of the row in front of him catches sight of him and rumbles forward. «Identify!» it demands in a warble of Binary. «Identify!»

“I’m Poe Dameron, who are you?” Poe greets it politely.

«IR-1983!» It shakes itself and then rolls toward him. «What is your business here?»

“You an irrigation droid or a sentry droid?” Poe asks, amused. “And I’m here because Rey asked me to come.”

This gives the droid pause. «Mistress-Rey! Asked for you!»

“Yeah, buddy, I know some people.” Poe laughs though, especially when the irrigation droid’s questioning draws the attention of a round boy up the row.

«Friend-Poe!» BB-8 comes hurtling towards him, hopping over some of the bumps in the garden.

“BeeBee! We talked about that!” Rey calls out to him, and Poe realizes how much he missed the sound of her voice.

And then BeeBee slams into his shins and Poe remembers how much he missed his “Buddy!” He greets his droid exuberantly. “Gods, I missed you.”

He kneels in the now rich sand, more like dark silt, and scrubs at BeeBee’s round belly with a long chuckle. BeeBee trills happily under the attention, and Poe’s still laughing as Rey walks up.

“Hi there, General,” she says, waving her staff back and forth as she walks through the greenery, her footsteps careful and agile. Poe smiles up at her and stands, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun.

“Hey, Jedi.” He grins, easy and soft, and he almost forgets why he’s there until BB-8 rams him gently. “Uh, where’s the little guy who needs help?”

Rey leads him to the homestead, where she’s parked a different IR model inside, as though shielding it from the sunlight. She kneels down carefully to power it up, and with a spark and puff of blue smoke, it trembles to life.

«Gr-gr-gr-greetings» it intones. «I am-am-am-» and Rey powers it back down.

“Babu Frik says there’s a patch to fix its memories, but I can’t take it, not with the-” Rey gestures over her shoulder to where she’s brought life back to Tatooine, and he knows she feels guilty. He can see it in her face.

“I got it,” he promises, patting the droid on the side. “Lemme get him on the ship, Sunshine. I’ll take care of him.”

“Thank you.” Her smile is grateful and warms him to the core like a shot of Corellian whiskey. Poe nods and pretends that her smile doesn’t affect him half as much as it does.

In a few hours, after she’s encouraged him to drink something that tastes a little bit like tea but a thousand times more bitter, more rust than water, he flies off with BeeBee, D-O, and the IR-unit.

“You sure you’ll be okay without all this company?” Poe asks, worried as ever as he glances around the farm. She’s coaxed green to the surface of a cursed piece of rock, sure, but she can’t talk to plants. Not even Rey can get that kind of conversation out of something.

“I’ll be fine.” Rey ducks her head when she answers, as though blocking her eyes from the sun, but he thinks she might be afraid of what he’ll see in her face.

“I’ll call,” he promises further, touching her elbow gently to get her to look back up. She does with a sad smile. “I’ll call as soon as we land. And as soon as I get this bucket of bolts back online.”

“Do that.” Rey nods, points at his ship, and smirks at him. “Go on, before D-O and BB-8 hijack you and leave you stranded here. They’ll do it.”

Sure enough, he hears his engines powering on.

“Oh, Force,” he curses, glaring at the A-Wing.

“Go on,” Rey encourages him, pushing at his side. “Quick now, or they’ll be gone.”

Poe nods, glances over his shoulder at her one last time as he jogs to the ship, and then embarks, taking off quickly with his bevy of impatient droids. He doesn’t even make it to Yavin 4 before he calls Rey.

He sees a shooting star leaving Tatooine’s atmo, and he calls with breathless laughter to report it to her. She teases him a little bit for calling down over frozen rock breaking apart in the atmosphere, but her voice is warm, fond, and he’s grinning as they disconnect.

“Let’s go home, boys,” he says to the droids rattling around in his ship, setting the course to Yavin 4. He knows the way home from Tatooine by heart now.

When he lands, he gets Babu Frik on the holopad and asks for the patch so he can run it through the IR-unit’s program.

“Heyyy, you got it!” Babu answers cheerfully, and Poe can see his oversized fingers flying to send him the code. Poe sits back and waits, absentmindedly scratching BB-8’s dome as he waits. “Heyyy, Dameron!”

“What, Babu?”

“Howza Jedi, huh huh?” Babu giggles when Poe shoots him a look. “Pretty lita, oh, no?”

“Jeez,” Poe mutters, wondering why he’s suddenly blushing. “Why, Babu, gotta crush?”

“No me,” Babu pokes back, sending the code at last. It pops up on Poe’s screen with a ping. “Crush you?”

“Bah.” Poe snorts and starts uploading the code to IR-1977.

«Friend-Poe?» BeeBee looks up at him, optical unit fully engaged. «...What is a Crush?»

“Don’t worry about it, buddy,” Poe grumbles.

While the code is loading to IR-1977, Poe fixes some supper as BeeBee idly tells him tales of the farm on Tatooine, tales of the bravery of Hero-Rey and her gentleness. Poe smiles at the thought of Rey being gentle -- not that it’s surprising. It’s oddly nice to hear the strongest person in the galaxy is so gentle with droids, and Poe’s certainly seen the evidence of that.

But then BeeBee says something that gives him pause.

«Hero-Rey is on her own.» It trills sadly and rolls so it’s staring at the ground. «Not even Designation: Self remains with her. And Designation: Friend-Poe left so quickly.»

“We had to get going, buddy, Eye-Arr needed us,” Poe points out, his stomach churning at the thought of _Rey_ and _alone_ in the same sentence, even though most days he’s at least subconsciously thinking of that exact thing (usually when _he’s_ alone).

«Yes. This is true.» BeeBee concedes, and Poe thinks that’s the last of it, and until it rolls behind him, humming something to itself, as they head to bed.

“What’s that, buddy?”

«A song Hero-Rey would sing us before bedtime» BeeBee answers. «To make sure we could all sleep. It was very quiet at night. Very scary.»

“And she’d sing for you droids?” Poe asks, smiling fondly at the image. “To stop you from being scared?”

«And herself» BeeBee beeps. It sounds unfairly forlorn, and Poe stares at it, trying to figure out its gambit, but BeeBee only keeps beeping its new tune and rolls past him.

Poe grips the doorframe of the bedroom and sighs mightily. Looks like he has a call to make in the morning.

* * *

**006\. Rey**

Rey wakes with the first sun. Night on Tatooine is short… but the darkness is as absolute as its sunlight, and the Force around her homestead rustles with ghosts. Not the blue, meddlesome ghosts that she can see--Luke and Leia and sometimes, off in the distance, an old man in sweeping robes and a long cape, staring at her as though _she_ is the otherworldly entity; he’s familiar in a way that Rey can’t place. The ghosts that haunt the air at night here are… so, so sad. _Heartbroken_ maybe, but Rey doesn’t know what heartbreak feels like. Not… in the way that she can tell these spirits are. These energies who don’t know where to go.

But they melt away with the shadows when the suns rise, so Rey only gets out of bed. She readies herself for the day and is amazed anew at the ready source of water from IR-1983’s spigots. She _bathes_ now. In an old durasteel tub. She has her own chip of soap from the Mos Eisley marketplace, and it smells like the violently pink fruit she ate at Maz Kanata’s castle.

That day feels like it was a lifetime ago. Maybe sometime, if she remembers, she will ask BB-8 to send a holocall to Maz, just to make sure that she’s alright.

After her bath, Rey fills a canteen with more clean water--the first day, she reused her bathwater, not wanting to waste any precious fluids, but learned quickly that although her soap smells delicious, it does _not_ taste good--and heads out to the deep crevasse where the huge kaup birds nest. They lay far more eggs than they will hatch, and Rey uses the Force to sense which will become baby birds and which are lifeless and free for the taking.

She digs with her hands and feet deep into the dunes, down to where the sand is cool and moist. The eggs themselves are cold and have beautiful orange shells. Rey has saved several, after eating up all of the insides, and she uses them as bowls. They’re pretty. She owns pretty things now.

Eggs in tow, Rey rides across the flats to meet with the Jawas’ sandcrawler. Most often she meets with Jot, who seems friendlier than the rest of his species. On their first meeting, he proudly told Rey that he rode a spaceship once, all the way to Chenini moon to welcome a contingent of Offworld Jawas come for pilgrimage. Chenini was only about a twenty-minute flight from Tatooine itself, and didn’t even require hyperspeed, but Rey complimented Jot’s bravery all the same.

“Hlela ukudla kwasekuseni?” Jot lifts the enormous orange egg in both--hands? Paws? Rey doesn’t know.

To the curious Jawa’s amusement, Rey has been trying to learn Jawaese. She knows from observation that much of the language is communicated by smells, which… she is rather glad not to be able to emanate, if she’s honest… but she can at least understand the words now. It seems polite to let Jot speak his own language.

She’s never accepted his offer to stay and eat their eggs together before. But the ghosts back at the Skywalker farm had been so _loud_ last night, without BB-8 and D-0 there to keep them at bay.

“Ibana,” Rey agrees. “Kepha kumele ngipheke okwami.”

“Waste! Egg! Waste! No tasty!” Jot argues, shaking his own egg.

“Maybe for you,” Rey laughs. “But I think it’s much tastier to eat eggs cooked.”

Jot grumbles with a sound like a loth-cat sneezing, and then he disappears into a cranny of the sandtrawler. A few moments later, he emerges with a blow-torch almost as long as he is tall. “Hot!”

“Yes, it certainly is.” Rey buries her kaup egg in a nest of sand, then sets to work roasting the whole bundle with the blowtorch. Jot watches her with those eerie glowing eyes, hands already covered in the rich protein slime of the kaup’s orange eggyolk.

“Mningi umsebenzi okufanele wenziwe.” He emanates a smell like a droid backfiring, and Rey is glad that she isn’t already eating.

“I suppose it is more work to have to cook food before you eat it.” Rey laughs again. She pokes the smoldering sand with a long bit of salvage and misses her staff. “But I’m sure there are things that you do that take a lot of work, too, that I don’t need to do.”

Jot makes a thoughtful noise and a smell like the wrong end of a happabore. “Sandcrawl. Sandcrawl.” He gestures with a sticky hand. “Jot… wish? Wish?”

“That’s the right word,” Rey encourages. “Yizwi elifanele lelo.”

“Jot wish… Jawa… fly. Zoom! Fast! Speeder-speeder.” He shakes his head beneath his tattered brown hood. “Time slow… in sandcrawl.” He pauses and nibbles more of the drippy raw egg. “Lonely.”

Rey is quiet long enough to carefully pull her cooked egg from its bed of sand. She rubs the pretty shell clean with one of her wraps, then breaks the end of the shell. She isn’t so hungry anymore. “Humans can get lonely, too, I’m afraid. Even moving fast, time can be very slow.”

Rey leaves Jot after eating half of her egg and tucking the remaining half into her rucksack, along with some small transformers and elemental resistors that Jot set aside for her after their last meeting. She rides her speeder back to the Skywalker moisture farm… and the desert is so silent.

Jakku was probably silent, too. But she didn’t notice the same way, because she had never been around people.

Been around friends.

She misses Finn’s joking. And Rose’s intelligent corrections. She misses Kaydel swooning over Jessika, and Jessika fighting with Suralinda Javos. She misses the way that Snap and Karé were so gloriously in love. She misses BB-8’s adoration and D-0’s growing bravery and R2-D2’s grumpy swearing. She even misses Threepio.

And she misses… it’s silly to miss Poe. He was here only yesterday. If he had wanted to visit with her, he would have stayed.

Once she’s back on the homestead, she does her chores with a vengeance. The little school in Mos Eisley depends on this energy generator, and she _will_ fix it today. She _will_ bottle canisters of clean water to give beings in the marketplace who can’t afford new filters. Just because she is lonely here doesn’t mean she needs to be alone.

But still, her stomach aches.

She doesn’t think that it’s the kaup egg.

Once the first sun has set, Rey heads back inside the silent mudstone hut and drinks her own canister of cool water. She’ll rehydrate a portion of veg-meat with the second half of her roasted egg. It’s more than she ever had on Jakku, and there is no reason to feel so sad.

She almost misses the blinking light on her datapad while she shoves veg-meat in her mouth. She isn’t expecting a message from Babu today, not with IR-1977 already safely with Poe. Did something go wrong with the memory patch? Rey tries to brace herself for the sadness of losing the skittish, tearful troid as the message powers up.

“Hey, Rey.” Rey blinks. Sets down her dinner. It’s Poe, tousled hair glowing in the blue light of the holo, with bags under his eyes like he’d hardly slept. “Listen, everything’s fine with all of the droids, so don’t--don’t worry. I just… we all miss you, out here, and I was thinking… if you want, you can come and visit us out here on Yavin Four. For real this time, not just a refuel stop and go. I know the droids would sure love to see you.” He pauses, and he’s so still that Rey thinks her datapad’s frozen before he finally coughs and ducks his head. “And I’d love to see you, too. If you want. No pressure, if you don’t. That’s uh, that’s it. Oh, and Babu says ‘hello!’” Rey laughs at the way Poe mimics Babu’s silly little voice. “So, I guess, when you get this message, uh… well, you know how to find me. Through Beebee. Okay. Bye.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading the first chapter!


End file.
